I did a little search and it seems like the editor of Polybius never uses ὅ τι to distinguish it from ὅτι.

GENERAL QUESTIONS:

How do we know when we are faced with that? It seems like there has to be indirect speech or a superlative (where ὅτι indicates "as possible"). And so any other occurrence has to be the indefinite relative ὅ τι. Is that correct?

SPECIFIC QUESTIONS:

Are both of the following occurrences both indefinite relatives? I assume they are.

OK, I looked around, and I now assume that these are both the conjunction ὅτι and not the indirect relative. What confused me is that when we say in English, "That he won the competition is great", this use of "That" is also for a dependent clause. Is that true? The way the grammar books jump to talking about indirect discourse and ὅτι is rather misleading because you don't need any indirect discourse to employ ὅτι with a dependent clause. And the way the grammar books say that it also gets used with impersonal expressions also is misleading because that makes it sound like there is some relatively small list of such expressions. In fact, the Greek is just like the English. We can say "That p is adj." for any adj.

And assuming that is so, then it still seems we need another copula in the second example, ie that it is implicit. What do you think?

pster wrote:But I can't find any place where Smyth discusses sentences like "That he won the competition is great".

Non-referenced, gut response: I think this construction is a feature of English syntax but not necessarily of Greek (look up cleft sentences, I'm not sure if this is exactly what it is, but it's a similar phenomenon in any case). In Greek I would expect an articular infinitive or participle construction or something (him having won the competition is great). Not 100% sure of this, and I'll see if I can find examples if I have a chance, but Smyth is still on the other side of the Atlantic, so no promises.

I think in sentences with dependent clauses the copula is often omitted/implied,but in something like this where the order is reversed (not a common feature of Greekaccording to spiphany above) as well as the need for another copula inside the dependent clause - "[that x is y] is [z]"- , the first copula is explicit.

But like you said, we need evidence from Smyth or another grammar book for such a sweeping statement.

2) Why does the first one have a demonstrative, but not the second one?

3) Nate, I don't follow. What do you mean by "first"? You mean independent?

4) How different are they?

I see them both as ὅτι and the first one as an example of Smyth 2577.Regarding the neut. for fem., there is a Smyth section about this but I don't remember the number.The gist of it was that it is common to use the neut. in explanatory statements like this.

By first copula I meant the one in the dependent clause [that x is y] is [z].You can say ἐκ τούτων συμφανές (ἐστι) τὸ λεγόμενον ἀληθές εἶναι*. Perhaps you'll find exampleswhere both copulas are implicit.

* corrected.

Last edited by NateD26 on Sat Jan 12, 2013 9:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

He makes it sound like a lot of the oti's that one encounters in indirect speech in Attic are really o,it! In other words that a lot of what one might think are indirect statements are indirect questions.

pster wrote:Thanks spiphany and Nate. So where do you guys come down? Are these both ὅτι? Or is either of them ὅ τι?

Sorry, I think my post was unclear. I don't have any particular insight into ὅτι versus ὅ τι, perhaps because I've seen the process of relatives turning into conjunctions often enough in various languages that I sort of figure it's a fluid distinction anyway.

I was responding to the English example you gave -- "That he won the competition is great" -- and expressing my (gut) reaction that Greek wouldn't use ὅτι (or ὅ τι) at all, but some kind of substantivized verb form (infinitive or participle phrase) instead. As I said, I can't back it up, so make of it what you will.